


just frame the halves (and call them brothers)

by isozyme



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, F/M, First War with Voldemort, Gen, Marauders
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2014-01-09
Packaged: 2018-01-08 02:12:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isozyme/pseuds/isozyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>It’s been a long summer, Sirius thinks.  He’s tired of everyone telling him not to trust Moony, and he’s tired of not trusting himself to protect his friends from Death Eaters.  All the people he likes are trying to kill all the other people he likes, and it’s exhausting.  He hasn’t had time to think of a plan to save Regulus, and he hasn’t thought of a way to prove that Remus isn’t a spy.  Sirius isn’t sure what he exists for, if he can’t do either of those two things, but he keeps on existing despite it all, and it’s a drag.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	just frame the halves (and call them brothers)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [elanid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanid/gifts).



> This is not a coherent plot, but rather a collection of scenes all written today, of all the awful things that happened to Sirius Black during the first war. It is trashy and self-indulgent to the highest degree. I hope she appreciates it.

*

The first one of them to kill someone is Prongs, but Sirius watches it.

The Death Eaters shouldn’t know they’re here -- that’s the first thing Sirius thought when the house started crumbling with them in it.

They’re crashing on the second floor, all the Marauders plus Lily, in one of the Order’s wayhouses. The wizarding family that used to live here left for America in a hurry. The threats must have been sudden, and bad, because they didn’t even come home to pick up their pet cat. It has taken to sleeping on top of Peter, waking occasionally to swat at his terrible attempts at a beard.

Being here isn’t even part of a mission. The Order’s previous safehouse was compromised, and its inhabitants ordered to scatter. This is the temporary solution for their particular group -- a solution with no heat, no electricity, and one very lonely cat. Sirius is pretty pleased with it overall; the less lucky members are stuck camping.

Outside, the Death Eaters are picking off supporting walls from a distance. It’s the early hours of the morning, when they’re at their most vulnerable. Even Remus had finally conked out, his head heavy on Sirius’s chest when they awoke to disaster. They scramble for the stairs, hauling each other by hands and shoulders and shirtfronts, while Lily has the smart idea to levitate the bedroom’s giant, cushy mattress above them as an impromptu shield.

“Run, run!” Sirius calls, and nobody tells him that it’s stupid since they’re running already. Everyone is yelling, swearing and directions and warnings.

From the trajectories of the spells, there’s two Death Eaters, and hopefully not more. Remus hexes one through a window as they pass -- a lucky shot, and a non-lethal one at that. When the kick their way out the door Remus peels off to go deal with the fallen enemy, while the rest of them pelt after the other.

Sirius is first in line, running the Death Eater down on the street, throwing curses fast enough that he can’t get the breath to apparate. It’s four wands against one, but they’re stupid and young and the Death Eater is vicious. He hits Peter with Crucio and the poor idiot drops his wand in the gutter. Sirius and James and Lily back him into an alley and try to pound through his shields, but he keeps conjuring quick snaking ropes that bind the wrists and make it hard to wield a wand.

Lily gets tired of brute spellwork and starts using the Death Eater’s earlier tactics against him, raining bricks down on him from the walls above, but it’s dangerous and he keeps deflecting them back at her. A chunk of masonry flings itself into her knee with a crunch and she goes down screaming.

“ _Lily!_ ” James yells. 

“Don’t get distracted!” Sirius hollers at him, fighting his way free of more clinging ropes. They feel like they’ve been covered in tar and rolled in glass -- Sirius expects to soon die an inglorious death from a thousand papercuts.

But it’s too late, the Death Eater has already disarmed James with a flick of his wand and a flash of red light. Sirius struggles harder, but now it’s one wand against one wand, and Sirius’s inexperience is betraying him, and his enemy is laughing behind his mask, enjoying his coming victory.

Then Prongs rears up to his full height, his stag height, and he rushes forward at the Death Eater, fifty stone of hooves and fury. The Death Eater has time to look up and gasp once before he takes Prongs’s antlers straight in the chest. Prongs bears him up against the wall, slamming the breath out of him over and over.

For a long time after the Death Eater stops moving, Prongs stands there, flanks shuddering, antlers draped with the dead man’s robes like a macabre tent. It’s awful and Sirius doesn’t know what to do, so he just stands there with blood seeping sluggishly out of the cuts in his hands. He doesn’t want to know what the Death Eater looks like under the mask. It’s better when it could be anyone.

It takes until Lily says “James, let him down,” before he changes back. There’s blood in his hair and he looks like he’s about to be sick.

Sirius punches him in the shoulder as he passes, says “nice one, Prongs, you nailed him,” but his heart isn’t in it. He feels about as sick as James looks and is worried that it’s showing on his face.

Peter’s found his stupid wand by the time they limp out of the alley. “Is he dead? How’d they find us? Whoa what happened to Evans?”

There’s a thud of boots and Remus sprints into view. “The Order is here,” he says. “I don’t know how they found us -- even McGonagall is stumped.”

The Order moves them to a different wayhouse, and nobody ever turns up anything clear about how the Death Eaters found them, but the word _spies_ gets thrown around like a curse. Sirius hears Remus’s name in whispered conversations that he’s not supposed to be eavesdropping on. It’s enough that Remus starts getting sent away more, and Sirius misses him.

When Sirius goes for runs as a dog, James stays home with Lily and messes around with maps instead of changing into a stag to keep up with him.

*

The fighting keeps getting worse after that, but the older adults in the Order get smarter about where they send the teenagers, and Sirius learns what it’s like to get sent on endless useless fetch quests.

On one of these frequent errands, Sirius walks through Hogwarts, wearing last year’s school robes that are already straining across the shoulders. Some of the muscle he’s packed on as a dog running long loops of patrol is bleeding into his human frame, changing him from gangly to sleek. Sirius thinks he has become war-hardened and attractive, and winks at a passing sixth year.

The Order thinks that he’s gone to Hogwarts to pilfer more books from the library. He’s got a list, which includes some titles from the Restricted Section. Sirius had protested briefly for the sake of his honor about not knowing a thing about sneaking books out of the Restricted Section, but McGonagall had raised her eyebrows at him over her glasses and he’d given it up.

There’d been talk of sending a small team, or just asking Dumbledore to send the books directly, but the Order wanted Dumbledore to operate with some measure of plausible deniability, and Sirius had insisted on going, and going alone.

Spring is fading early into amber-colored summer, crisp with drought. It makes the fires worse, when they’re set, bad enough that there’s members of the Order offering free tutoring in augmented Aguamenti Charms to any half-blood and muggle-born families that want it. At Hogwarts it means that exams are coming. The common rooms and dedicated study spaces are full of students frantically memorizing for their theory tests, and the grounds are packed with students frantically avoiding the same work.

Sirius finds Regulus in the Great Hall, which is a substandard study spot, drafty even in the heady days of late spring. He’s tucked in a corner by a door, and doesn’t look up right away when Sirius steps over the bench to sit beside him.

“Hey Reg,” Sirius says, and Regulus startles, dropping his quill. Ink goes everywhere. “You are such a square,” Sirius laughs, while Regulus scowls and gathers up his notes.

“Dammit Sirius,” Regulus says. “You couldn’t come any of the many times I didn’t have my N.E.W.T.s in two hours?”

“You’re ready, studying more now will just make your brain tired,” Sirius says, with the authority of one who passed many tests by sheer innate smarts and minimal schoolwork.

“Maybe that’s how it works for you,” Regulus says, and Sirius shrugs.

Regulus looks like he hasn’t been sleeping. He looks a lot like what Sirius has been seeing in the mirror lately, but without the tan and the muscle tone. There’s a worrying bruise under his hairline that’s ineptly covered by the sweep of his bangs, gone yellow and mottled.

They bicker comfortably about schoolwork and letters from home for a while, while Sirius does his best to hide how much he misses Regulus. It’s not right to have so many obvious feelings, but James and Lily and Remus break out in emotions like hives and it’s started happening to Sirius as well, to his alarm.

Suddenly Regulus flinches in the middle of telling Sirius about a prank pulled by the underclassmen, and his hand goes furtively to his left forearm to rub at it. His eyes are wide and dark and he looks hunted.

“What’s that,” Sirius demands, even though he knows, and doesn’t particularly want to hear Regulus talk about it.

Regulus shakes all over, a bone-deep shudder of pain and fear. “It’s not your business,” he says. “But it’s not for me, I just caught an echo.”

It’s horribly obvious that Regulus is in over his head. Sirius feels responsible, for not being there at the start when Regulus started clipping You-Know-Who’s crap rhetoric out of the papers. He’s afraid that if he looks too carefully he’ll find that Regulus is a terrible person and he’ll have to murder everyone else who notices. He’s afraid that Regulus already knows what kind of person he’s become. It’ll be his fault, if that’s happened.

“I’ll get you out,” Sirius tells Regulus, grabbing him by the right arm, terribly aware of which wrist he’s taking. Regulus doesn’t wince. “I got out, there’s ways.” He can’t tell Regulus about Snape -- Sirius himself isn’t sure about Snape -- but Regulus is shaking his head.

“You got out when you were eleven. I’m in too deep.”

“The Order will take you!” Sirius says. He doesn’t like what Regulus has done any more than Regulus seems to like himself, but he’s family. The Order will listen to him if he has to scream in Dumbledore’s ear for a week. “I’ll make them take you.”

Regulus blinks in surprise. He looks younger when he’s shaken, and Sirius wonders how much of his deadly killer’s gaze is a disguise these days. “I hadn’t even thought about what the Order would do. There’s no opt-out clause with the Dark Lord, Sirius.”

“Don’t call him that,” Sirius snaps.

“Fine! There’s no opt-out clause with Voldemort.”

Sirius flinches and Regulus takes the chance to wrench his arm away. They stand up to pace around the table, giving each other space for a few moments to build their masks back up. They learned this time-out strategy at home, where there had been no safe places except each other, and not even that when they fought. It was a small way to keep surviving -- at least between the two of them, once a series of blows was dealt there was a break to tally damages and dab at emotional bruises before the next salvo.

“I’d kill anyone who came after you,” Sirius promises, breaking the silence early. “I’d kill them all.” 

Eventually one of them would kill him, and then Regulus next. It doesn’t matter. He knows this from experience: even in the past few months there’s a half-dozen examples of what happens when the Death Eaters get determined about hunting someone. Sirius wonders if Regulus has ever been one of the hunters and feels sick. But Regulus is his little brother and Sirius would do anything for him -- _it doesn’t matter._

Regulus knows all the same examples, and probably sees what Sirius is offering -- come away from this and at least we’ll die together. 

“No,” Regulus says, and Sirius moves to interrupt him but Regulus steps abruptly closer and Sirius has to back off. Regulus continues slowly, deliberately, every word calculated to hurt as deeply as possible. “I don’t want you to help. I don’t trust you. Ever since you sorted into Gryffindor, you abandoned family to be with those--”

“Don’t say it,” Sirius says. The Black family does not beg, but Sirius can’t help it; he doesn’t want Regulus to save him by tearing their relationship apart. Regulus will say unforgivable things to get his way, has always been willing to go farther than Sirius.

“-- mudbloods and blood traitors,” Regulus says over him, raising his voice so that students halfway down the long table stop their conversation and turn to stare. They look scared.

“You’re still family,” Sirius tries.

“I am, but _you’re_ not,” Regulus says, with vicious finality. Sirius remembers the scorched spot on the family tapestry and hates everything, including Regulus, for a transcendent moment. Regulus stands in front of him, impatient and equally furious. “I have exams to sit, get out of the way.”

Sirius discovers that he’s standing in the doorway and steps aside, then watches Regulus’s back as he retreats. He walks with his head tucked down, like he’s expecting a blow. Sirius will save him, as soon as he can, as soon as he has time and resources to spare. It’s always been his job to save Regulus, even when he doesn’t want to be saved.

*

The summer blazes hot and stays dry, and the Order musters as many of its forces together as is safe and goes on a raid. The Marauders are together again for the first time in a month and a half, but it’s grim and Sirius doesn’t like it.

The raid is a nightmare. The Death Eaters had a family of goblins penned in their subterranean rural home, and when they caught wind of the Order’s arrival they set it on fire.

Sirius doesn’t know what’s happened to the rest of his team, doesn’t remember the plan, and he can’t breathe through the smoke and Confundus charms. There’s a lot of screaming. Every enemy wears a mask and moves with ducking, whippy grace that reminds Sirius of Regulus.

He pulls a spell at the last minute, bursting a tree trunk instead of a Death Eater’s head, and behind him he hears Remus yell as a jinx that missed Sirius hits him in the face. He falls, clawing at his throat like he’s trying to loosen a garotte, and Sirius throws himself on the ground, trying every counter-jinx he knows, stopping only to cry out for help that keeps not coming.

Remus is still struggling for air when Moody’s voice, amplified by spell, booms “Fall back! Fall back! We are routed, fall back.”

Sirius grabs Remus by the shoulders and apparates them straight to Order headquarters, which is swiftly filling with injured, sooty wizards. McGonagall swoops over them and lifts the spell on Remus, who coughs explosively for a spell and then lies back, panting, while Sirius silently dares anyone to get near.

It’s been a long summer, Sirius thinks. He’s tired of everyone telling him not to trust Moony, and he’s tired of not trusting himself to protect his friends from Death Eaters. All the people he likes are trying to kill all the other people he likes, and it’s exhausting. He hasn’t had time to think of a plan to save Regulus, and he hasn’t thought of a way to prove that Remus isn’t a spy. Sirius isn’t sure what he exists for, if he can’t do either of those two things, but he keeps on existing despite it all, and it’s a drag.

*

When Sirius gets the news Regulus has been dead for a month. He might even have been dead during the awful battle where Sirius’s hesitance almost got Moony killed.

Mundungus Fletcher’d read off his ratty list of ex-Death Eaters with barely a pause over Regulus’s name. He’d grunted “that’s the Black one, he was crafty,” and kept reading. Sirius’s world hadn’t stopped. He’d kept existing, and then he’d been asked to go do the dishes, which were considerable give the number of occupants in and out of the safehouse.

Nobody treats him particularly specially. Lots of people have dead family, and most of their dead family hadn’t been asking for it by turning Death Eater first.

Not two days later, James pulls Sirius aside in a hallway and says, “I wanted you to be the first one to know -- Lily and I are pregnant, we’re going to have a kid!”

Sirius sits on his impulse to ask what James thinks he’s doing, bringing a kid into a world like this, and instead is happy for him.

*

It’s two in the morning when everyone is roused by a muggle arriving in the safehouse. McKinnon and Tonks were on watch, and woke up everyone in the house with the alarm.

“False one,” Tonks tells Sirius as everyone stumbles down the stairs, wands out and yawns stifled by wariness. “Muggle with a portkey.”

House awakened, someone starts up coffee and tea. Sirius catches Remus putting an expanding spell on the table and walls out of the corner of his eye. Everyone’s pretty much already dressed, and yesterday’s robes will serve for today’s clothes just as well as they serve for nightclothes.

“My wife’s at a normal shelter,” the man is telling McKinnon, who’s shooting warning looks at anyone who crowds too close to him. She’s installed him in the most comfortable chair in the room, and has already magicked him up some tea, too impatient to wait for the communal pot. “Her and the kids are all beat up, and they wouldn’t let me through the door. They thought I was dangerous, thought I did it,” he finishes, and laughs. He sounds broken and hysterical, and McKinnon waves behind her back for more tea. “She gave me that old rag and told me it’d take me to her kind of people. Told me it was somewhere that was safe.”

Sirius nudges Lily with his shoulder, since she’s sitting nearest. “Safe! That’s a hell of a lie she fed him.”

Lily smiles like she wants to laugh, but sobers quickly. “She did her best, Sirius.” Across the table, Peter snickers a little too late at Sirius’s joke and Lily kicks him, hard, in the ankle. “We’re all doing our best,” she says, and scrapes her chair back to leave.

*

James and Remus are waiting for Sirius when he sneaks out of the safehouse’s front door, past the apparation alarms, with only the vaguest sketch of a plan in his head. It’s noontime and the sun is high, so most of the usual guards are napping or genuinely busy with other things and Sirius had been hoping to slip away unnoticed.

“Moody said you’d be trying something like this soon,” James says.

Sirius spreads his hands. “I just wanted some fresh air,” he says.

James laughs in his face. “Yeah, pull the other one, Padfoot. I can’t believe you didn’t even write a note.”

“What, now I can’t leave the safehouse?”

“No,” Remus says, and Sirius resists the urge to growl at him.

“You’re not allowed to go on revenge-missions,” James says, while he and Remus herd Sirius back inside, like sheepdogs with a lone wandering charge.

Sirius kicks a chair, when he gets inside, for no particular reason except that it feels good to kick a chair.

Remus quietly puts the chair back upright, and it makes Sirius angry. Nobody’s reacting right to anything, Regulus is dead and they’re all doomed and he’s not allowed to trust Remus, but everyone still cares that the chairs are arranged upright.

He gets corralled into the back breakfast room, where James has been keeping all of his maps. James and Remus settle down around the table, but Sirius doesn’t want to sit. “I want to kill them,” he says, and he thinks he manages it calmly. “It’s the only thing I can do.”

“You can’t just hare off and get revenge. We’re not in school anymore,” James says.

“I can!” Sirius shouts.

Their faces are dripping with concern and Sirius hates it. He hates being the one who’s shouting when he’s just saying what’s obvious.

“I can kill them because I’m on the right side!” Sirius yells. “It’s my job!” He’s being wild but he doesn’t care. Maybe this is what grief feels like for people like him. Moony has his wand out, under the table like he thinks Sirius can’t see it, like he hasn’t memorized the exact little hitch-and-shuffle Moony uses when he wants to get his wand out of his muggle jeans without getting out of his chair. Sirius doesn’t care about that either because Remus Lupin is a _fucking spy._

James frowns and puts his fists on the map like he would prefer to be ignoring Sirius’s meltdown. The map is a crude imitation of the Marauders Map and it keeps getting confused by imperius and fidelus charms. The Longbottoms have a scattering of new scars from trusting its information, and at this moment Sirius is ready to burn it.

Sirius keeps yelling. “If being on the right side means I can’t kill people who deserve it, then why am I even here? Huh? I chose this! I didn’t have to fight for you! And let me tell you, there’s not a lot of perks. It’d be nice to get to do just one thing I want before I kick off for the cause.”

“Sirius,” James says with a half-laugh, aiming for mock-shocked and landing right in the middle of genuinely scandalized.

“What?” Sirius asks, and he’s dead certain that he’s about to cross a line. “You’re okay with suicide missions but I’m supposed to pretend that any of us is going to live to see thirty?” James looks wounded and Sirius takes that as a sign to press harder, to win. “How old do you think your kid’s going to be when they find us and kill us all? Six months? Two years? Not born yet? Let’s place bets, c’mon, Moony, you’re in, over-under--”

“ _Silencio_ ,” Remus says, wand still under the table, voice quiet and sad.

Sirius’s mouth works for a few seconds past the point where his voice drops out of existence, and then he sits down on the table with a thud. He glares at his friends. Remus is practicing his face of unshakable calm, and James looks like he’s going to cry. Prongs’s face is beet red around the edges and squinched up in the middle. He looks like a goblin dipped in tomato juice, and it would be funny, if everything wasn’t so messed up. James crying isn’t noble or martyr-like, the way Sirius would have painted this picture when he was in third year and the war was a far-off romance of secret hideouts and unbreakable pacts -- it’s just awful.

James stands, takes two steps, and punches Sirius in the face.

When Sirius opens his mouth to apologize, no sound comes out, and he has to shut it again.

*

A couple weeks later, two more refugees have made it to the safehouse and Sirius goes to find James. He picks a time when Evans is out patrolling the nearby half-blood neighborhoods, because James likes to be alone then, so that nobody can see him worry.

“You should make it Wormtail,” Sirius says, from the doorway where he’s still got his nerve. “I shouldn’t be your secret-keeper.”

James shoves his quill into the spellbook to mark his place, getting ink on the pages and crushing the barbs when he shuts it. He’s been taking notes on defensive spells, Sirius sees, shields and dwelling-wards, stuff James couldn’t stand when they were in school.

“Don’t be stupid,” James says, and he grins at Sirius. “You’re my best mate, I trust you with anything.”

Sirius is, once more, astounded at James’s capacity for forgiveness once he’s decided someone’s on his side, which is almost as vast as his capacity for intolerance once he’s decided someone’s not. One of the few things the dirty Slytherin side got right -- always protect your own.

“No, James, look. You and Lily are Peter’s everything, he thinks you fucked the sun and fathered the moon. Plus, he’s a total slug, so nobody would ever guess.”

“Yeah?” James says, laughing bright and incredulous. “I want it to be you though. I trust you. You’d never give us up.” His sincerity burns at Sirius like a Stinging Wonder Candy. 

“I wouldn’t,” he promises, and hates that he can’t just have James’s perfect trust, hates that he’s going to ruin it with what he says next. “But if they told me who killed Regulus--” He can’t get the rest of it out.

“You’d think about it,” James finishes for him, and Sirius knows he’s thinking about the screaming a few weeks ago.

“Yeah,” Sirius says. “I would.” Sirius wants to go die in a hole for abandoning James like this, but the Death Eaters would probably get to him first and ruin the poetic gesture. 

James rubs his hands over his face and gets ink all in his eyebrows. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll talk to Lily.”

Moony’s a spy, Wormtail’s a slug, Sirius is compromised and all Prongs has got left is Lily. Sirius hopes she takes care of him.

*

James and Lily get married in the fall, when the weather is just starting to get brisk. They have the ceremony outside, and the leaves match Lily’s hair. It’s impossible to tell that she’s pregnant under the dress, but even if it wasn’t nobody cares. It’s a party, and all the stops have been pulled. The perimeter is booby-trapped, the invitations went out in code, and the rotating guard is changed every half hour so nobody has to miss out on too much of the fun.

Sirius dances with James, and then dances with Lily, and he dances with Remus too, who looks run ragged and uncomplicatedly happy to be here.

There’s a lot of empty seats, but everyone scoots together using fewer rows and fewer tables, so that Lily and James don’t have to count missing faces.

The party afterwards is a glow of good company and laughter, and Sirius finds himself charge of photographs. He snaps as many as he can, catches the moment when Lily and James swap wands and try to levitate cake into each other’s mouths, and when Hagrid makes half a speech and breaks down sniffling happy tears in the middle of it, and at the end he bullies everyone into a group shot.

Lily swats the camera out of his hands and makes him get into the picture too, levitating the camera rock-steady in front of them and pressing Sirius and James close. Sirius’s whole life feels like it’s ticking down. He thinks this might be the last party he’s ever going to see, but it’s a good one, and if Lily and James can just be happy at the end, it’ll have been enough.


End file.
